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Mike Mignola
SciFiNow
talks to Mike
Mignola about
his entry into
the comics
industry,
the creation
of Hellboy,
adapting
comics for the
big screen, and
how it feels to
get to “draw
monsters
for a living”…
What first got you excited about comics?
Boy, I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that! My cousin was a comic-book reader, and he introduced me to great old Marvel comics – stuff by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. The bug hit me that there was this whole world, a whole mythology, I was unaware of.
What inspired you to go from being a fan to working in the industry?
From an early age, fuelled by comics and the books I was reading, I loved the supernatural. As I went through art school, my goal was to make a living drawing monsters, but there aren’t many jobs doing that! Gearing myself towards becoming an illustrator, I started looking at comics again as a place where I could get away with drawing monsters. I didn’t think I was good enough to draw comics, but thought that by getting in there, inking other people’s work, I’d eventually get a job drawing covers or something. It never occurred to me to write my own stories at that point.
What prompted you to start scripting?
After ten years in the business, drawing a lot of stuff that didn’t have monsters in it, I realised the only way I was going to get to draw the stuff I wanted to draw was to make it up myself. I co-wrote a Batman story –basically: here’s a list of the things I wanna draw – and it was fun. I then thought that instead of making up weird stories and sticking established characters into them, why not make up my own characters, specifically for these kinds of supernatural stories?
And this is when Hellboy was born?
Yeah. I knew the stories and subject matter I wanted to do, and so it was just a matter of making up a character to base stories around. Hellboy isn’t a character I’d planned to do; I just wanted a cult detective kind of character. I’d have made him a regular human being, except I knew I’d get bored drawing that, and so I thought of making a fun monster my main character.
Hellboy stories contain plenty of mythology, horror and fantasy elements. Where does your inspiration for these things come from?
Well, the first couple of Hellboy books are an explosion – everything and the kitchen sink is thrown in there, because who knew how long I was going to get a chance to do this? So they include everything I ever wanted to draw: pulp magazine horror stories, B-movies, Victorian-era ghost stories… Basically, everything I’d ever seen was the inspiration for the first Hellboy books! Later, I gravitated towards folklore – something I’ve loved since I was a kid.
In fact, I’d originally planned on doing straight adaptations of folklore tales, but I realised once I’d done Hellboy, and that people liked it, I could do the same stories, but use Hellboy as a device to get people to read them. Straight adaptations of folklore tales would narrow the audience tremendously, but Hellboy, despite being beast of the apocalypse, has an ‘everyman’ appeal that readers can relate to.
What appeals to you about folklore?
I love the element of the absurd. Stuff happens where you go: “Wow! There’s no way I’d have made that up!” You don’t know why something works or happens, but the beauty is that it just does. For some reason, someone made up a story where Russian witch Baba Yaga sneaks into a guy’s house each night to count his silverware. God knows why! But there’s some other logic going on, which I refer to as ‘fairy tale logic’ – a kind of strangeness I find endlessly fascinating. One of the most important things in supernatural fiction is having an element where we don’t understand why things are happening, because once we do, they become science fiction.
And, ironically, you use a demon, Hellboy, to keep the things grounded!
There’s a schizophrenic nature to writing Hellboy. I listen to a lot of Shakespeare and Bible films, and I have a tendency to write dialogue in that kind of rhythm, especially when dealing with bad guys. After writing a couple of pages of that, I become embarrassed by what I’m doing. Hellboy is the part of me that’s my father’s son – he’ll say, “What the hell are you doing?” and let the reader know that I know the other thing is kind of silly. It’s a formula that’s worked well. Hellboy has my sensibilities, some of my sense of humour, but also my father’s real blue-collar working stiff attitude about things.
How did it feel to work on both script and art during Hellboy’s early days, thereby having almost total control over your creation?
It’s interesting, because initially I never wanted to write this stuff. I enjoyed coming up with stories, but liked the safety net of having a writer who’d put the words in there. John Byrne co-wrote the first Hellboy story, and my original plan was to give him a ‘laundry list’ of things I wanted to draw and have him knock it into shape. But by that point, I was making things up fast and, little-by-little, piecing the story together. I soon found there were things John changed that sounded more polished and professional, but they lacked the oddness and quirkiness of what I wrote, and some of the humour didn’t translate. John knew this, but all along he’d been saying I should be writing everything anyway; he never tried to make Hellboy his book, and he treated himself like bicycle training wheels! I can’t thank him enough for that, and at the end of the miniseries, he told me I was on my own!
The scariest moment was when I took over the next one, writing and drawing everything – it was in black and white, so I didn’t even have a colourist. But once I relaxed, I found there were so many things I could do as writer and artist.
The Hellboy comic is quite cinematic. Was the potential for a movie always at the back of your mind?
It never occurred to me, because I never thought I’d get to do a second Hellboy story! I thought I’ll do this one, and when no one buys it, I’ll limp back to whatever job I can get from Marvel or DC, but I’d at least be able to look back and say I once got to put my personality on the page. When Dark Horse said it was interested in developing a Hellboy film, I went: “Sure, I’m happy to take the movie option money, as long as you guys want to keep optioning it, but no one will ever make a film of this.” When I met Del Toro, I realised if anybody was going to make a Hellboy film, he was the guy to do it, but it was always such an uphill battle that I never thought it was gonna happen.
Was it hard seeing Hellboy changed for the big screen?
I’m not someone who says something needs to be like the source material. In fact, during my first meeting with Del Toro, I told him: “I’d love for the film to be true to the spirit of the character, but you turn it into whatever you want to.” I actually had an idea for an easier Hellboy movie sell; Del Toro was the one who wanted the film to be faithful to the comic!
But there are fairly big changes from the comic…
Yeah. Del Toro thought the love interest was necessary, and there were scenes in there he’d wanted to do for years, which Hellboy became a vehicle for. But that’s great! I wanted a filmmaker with his own agenda, because then you get an interesting film. And the process was good; we mostly saw eye-to-eye. But the five per cent where we didn’t was hard, because it was his film, and he had the final say on certain things with my character. To survive that, I had to remember the comic’s the comic, the film’s the film, and that I was working with a guy I really liked on his movie, not working on my movie. It’s a similar experience with the sequel, but increasingly the film is Del Toro’s, especially as the story veers further from the comic.
Why is the sequel’s direction towards the folklore side of the comics?
That was a conscious decision we both made, because that element was missing from the first film, which instead had the Lovecraft-meets-pulp-magazine-mad-scientist stuff. If you look at the two films together, you see the range of Hellboy.
How hard a pitch was Hellboy 2?
It was easier when Pan’s Labyrinth came out, which I’d not seen when we made up the story. Because we were pitching a story where Hellboy fights fairies and elves, we knew we’d have to jump in at some point and say: “But it’s not what you think! It’s going to be dark and scary!” After Pan’s Labyrinth, this was easier for studios to understand. People usually think of cute fairies in a garden, but in Hellboy you’ll see a nasty kind of fairy, and that’s not what an audience is used to, and certainly not what someone in a studio office is used to!
What prompted the Hellboy animated features?
Del Toro talked about an animation, and Revolution Studios set it up. I wasn’t the driving force behind it, but when I heard they wanted to do animation, I recommended Hellboy fan Ted Stone, who’d been at Disney and had recently become available. For an animation to happen, someone needed to be involved who understood the comic, because clearly Del Toro wasn’t going to have time to devote to it, and I’m not an animator – I know what to do story-wise, but animation’s a different medium to comics, so we needed someone who knew animation and who knew Hellboy.
Are you happy with the visual style, since it’s very different to your own?
I think the fans feel otherwise, but I was very happy the studio didn’t want to use my style. When things are in my style, I sit there going: “Oh, they don’t understand it, they’re not doing it right.” I just see the mistakes. And the style is another thing that distances it from the comics, making the animation an alternate version of Hellboy. It remains faithful to the spirit of the original, though, and the animation is closer to the stories I did than the movies.
Is it difficult to no longer be totally in control of Hellboy?
On one hand, it’s great, because I’m exposing Hellboy to a much wider audience, and more people will discover the comic. The flip side is that most will never see what I do, but at least I got something out to the world! And as someone who erases ten lines for every one he draws, not drawing for a while was actually a kind of relief. But you start to miss getting your hands into everything, and there’s a danger of spending so much time overseeing different things that you don’t get time to focus on any one thing.
So, what is the future for Mike Mignola?
I’ve been writing these past couple of years, and I’m getting that itch to draw and write some material myself, because there’s so much interesting stuff you can do when you’re doing everything yourself. I want to do something that’s more experimental, where I’m playing with the art form. I’ve also just co-wrote and illustrated Baltimore: Or, The Steadfast Tin Soldier And The Vampire with Chris Golden, and that worked out well. A few other things I’ve made up (which could be 200-page graphic novels) I’m not in a position to do, but the idea of writing them up, handing them over to Chris, and collaborating on another novel that I’d illustrate – that’s something we’ve talked about doing.
And Hellboy?
Hellboy has a future. I’ve plotted it to the end of the series – or what could be the end – so my goal is to get to do the whole story. Hopefully, I can get Duncan Fegredo [Hellboy’s new main artist] to stick around to the bitter end! God knows if he’ll do it, but I’m really happy with the collaboration, and I just want to finish the story!
That’d be great to see; few long-running series have a coherent beginning, middle and end. That’s one of the problems of mainstream comics: they have the illusion of change, but they’re properties of giant companies. They’ll never let you keep Superman dead! But because I control Hellboy – at least the comic-book version – I can make definite changes with the character, and they’re happening right now. It’s very strange: after ten years fumbling around in the Hellboy world, it’s now set on a certain course, and I’m turning corners where there’s no going back, which is exciting, but daunting.
The weird thing will be if Del Toro gets to do a third Hellboy film, which would probably be the end of that film cycle. He’d be doing the end of Hellboy a decade before I get to. One thing I’ve got to be real careful of is that I don’t tell Del Toro how I plan to end the comic, because I sure as hell don’t want him to put it on film first!
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